How to Identify Billing and Payroll Leakages and 6 Reasons Why You Are Facing Them

As enterprise organizations grow, they need additional resources to handle any new requirements that may come their way, including adding new locations. However, an increased workforce means that your labor and admin costs will also increase. Staffing costs are not only necessary but perhaps the most dominant kind of expenses for any organization. That is why managing accurate personnel data, primarily related to payroll, is absolutely essential for your business since it can directly affect your profit margins.

Payroll leakage is a term used to identify any unintended or unexpected spend caused by improper handling of employee data. Such losses can be attributed to various factors like incorrect time tracking, outdated technology, non-adherence to set compliance guidelines, manual input errors, and so on.

Enterprises build their strategies and future roadmap around decreasing any unnecessary costs to achieve business growth. Unless you take corrective actions to fix any leakages in your system, you are likely to lose tons of money before you even realize it. But to come up with a plan, one must understand how payroll leakages happen in the first place.

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Identifying Payroll Leakages

With a process as tricky and cumbersome as payroll, there are several areas where enterprises tend to incur wasteful spending. Let’s look at a few examples of where and how payroll leakages happen at an enterprise. Here are six reasons why you may be facing payroll leakage:

• Incorrect timesheet data: Many companies have their staff working in pre-defined shifts that are usually tracked via timesheets. Sometimes, employees may have to work overtime to finish any urgent project deliverables. The payroll team considers all these hours while processing the salary for each employee. However, some employees may intentionally or unintentionally add extra hours to their timesheets, resulting in excess payments and inflating the overall workforce budget.
• Manual errors: Many organizations still maintain their payroll data manually using tools such as Microsoft Excel. Not only can this prove to be time-consuming, but it may also result in erroneous results in the final payroll calculations. Without automated software, you are highly unlikely to identify any errors in your calculation until it’s too late and the amount has already been processed.
• Compliance inconsistencies: Every country has its own set of rules and regulations to safeguard employee interests. Some even have a minimum wage clause to prevent the exploitation of employees. However, these rules are pretty complicated and often change over time. Unless you keep evolving your processes and operations as per the new directives, your project, enterprise billing, and payroll calculations are likely to go off the rails. Additionally, if an organization fails to comply with any government policies, it may face severe penalties and incur audit and legal costs.
• Tracking legitimate expense: Organizations may pay employees additional remuneration to cover costs incurred as part of their work related to travel, food, lodging, etc. However, if you don’t enforce an upper limit on the amount that can be reimbursed, you are very likely to incur payroll leakage. Another critical requirement is to have a mechanism that can identify illegitimate or inaccurate receipts. For example, imagine an employee spending $200 every day just on dinner.
• Inaccurate job costs: Budget planning and estimation depend heavily on the resources working as a team. Companies tend to hire additional staff to handle the overall work and achieve stringent project timelines for a high-priority job/project. If the jobs are not tracked correctly, the associated costs are not accurate and that can lead to all kinds of issues, including overpayments and underbilling.
• Outdated software: A modern and configurable software ensures that you can effectively track different sets of payroll-related metrics and even generate predictive charts for analysis. Gathering and analyzing the collected data without a proper system may result in erratic and inaccurate calculations. If the system cannot cater to any new requirements, you may have to spend several hours updating the same manually.

Fixing the Payroll Leaks

Luckily, you can quickly identify and stop payroll leakages at your enterprise with proper training, pre-enforced validations, and the right set of tools. However, it is equally important to discover, understand, and measure the overall impact of the leakage so that you can recognize them quickly in the future. That is why planning and prior knowledge around this topic are crucial.

It is possible to rectify payroll leakages manually; however, it may prove to be a time-consuming process and still leave you with inaccurate results. A scalable and preferable solution is to use appropriate software to automate all your processes, requiring very little to no human observation. With automation, you can:

• Define set standards and practices to track time and all kinds of employee expenses.
• Create validations at different steps of the process to highlight any data inconsistencies beforehand.
• Have an approval mechanism to validate employee working hours to contain fraudulent entries.
• Get rid of unnecessary expenditures by enforcing limits and checks to prevent overspending.
• Generate accurate job costs, project budgets, and estimates and optimize your hiring needs.
• Configure reporting as per the latest guidelines to simplify audits and inspection.
• Save thousands of dollars on penalties and legal fees by ensuring adherence to region-specific labor policies.
• Use advanced time tracking software to prevent fraud further and bring an additional level of scrutiny to your process.
• Consolidate all the essential data and generate reports and dashboards to view spends in real time.

Stop Payroll Leakages to Increase Efficiency and Save Money

Payroll leakages at the enterprise level can be the result of reckless spending as well as hasty mistakes. Manual assessments and supervision methods may not be able to identify and prevent these areas from leaking revenue. You need to take several measures in pushing your company to a level of management that will allow you to save money, give your employees fair compensation for their hard work, and make sure that they are at the peak of their productivity.

By switching to a fully automated time tracking solution, you can significantly reduce the error frequency, save money, and increase business efficiency. While initially, the transition may seem like a challenging task to undertake, when you factor in the benefits of time tracking solutions in eradicating payroll mistakes, it will be clear that it’s worth the effort.

Want to learn more about the ROI of time tracking and the solution to accelerate payroll processing without sacrificing accuracy?

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